A blockchain to destroy alarmist fake news, Part 2

NOTE: Mike Lorrey is an advisor to trive.news and is a past contributor and moderator for WUWT.

In Part 1 I talked about how the Trive system works in its adversarial system of on-chain peer review and challenge that is incentivized by bounty rewards.

In the comments to the last piece, there were a number of questions about blockchain in general that can be better answered elsewhere, but suffice it to say, proof of work, delegated proof of stake, and other consensus algorithms that solve the Byzantine Generals Problem electronically have given us a new world where people of any nation can create institutions of trust within blockchain, as smart contracts that execute automatically, fairly the same way for everyone, every time.

That’s not as big a deal to most of us who have lived in nations with fairly stable and vibrant civil societies, where we have grown up trusting our governments, courts, banks, money supply, and even, for the most part, the news media, to be fair and balanced toward all. Most nations do not enjoy such advantages and are in development traps that perpetuate global poverty specifically because of a lack of institutions of trust.

We are seeing how through globalization, the mistrust and corruption of the developing world has been seeping into the developed world along with immigration, trade, etc. We can no longer trust our media. The courts are a mess of bias, police are blatantly abusive of citizens unless they are provably elites, elections are being stolen by voter fraud. Lastly, peer review has become corrupted as well, particularly in climate science, but the amount of scientific fraud in the world has been climbing in most every field at an alarming rate. Fully half of all medical research papers are deemed to be fake, as one example.

In a world where individuals do not trust each other, all can trust a smart contract on a blockchain. All data stored on the blockchain can be audited for validity, and cannot be changed.

With Trive, the system of weeding out fake news works pretty well. For the philosophical, it is obvious we cannot determine the actual capital T TRUTH since humans are all fallible and science is a process of gradually finding some increasing degree of truth that is sufficient for our present understanding. However we can weed out falsehood.

I’ve demonstrated how this process works, but the real questions are: who pays for all this, and why should the world care what happens on a blockchain?

While not implemented yet, the Trive system when fully realized will use a cryptocurrency called the Trive token as a form of money to incentivize the system. Anyone will be able to buy Trive Tokens on a number of crypto exchanges from other users or directly from Trive.news. These tokens will sit in your Trive wallet on the plugin, for you to submit as a bounty on any story you want to be trived.

Question: Why can’t mister fat wallet just buy a ton of tokens and pay a bunch of people to pollute the system with crap?

This questions addresses what we call a Sybyl Attack, where a group of individuals, or bot accounts, are used to overpopulate a system to bias the course of its blockchain. This is a valid concern when a blockchain is young and has few users. However once it has grown sufficiently, the public as a whole always exceeds the resources of any individual Sybyl attacker. One reason I’m publishing these stories on WUWT is to get the word out to the skeptical public so that YOU can be part of the solution.

But Trive is also building in some heuristics to spot Sybyl attackers: people using the same IP address or MAC address, to submit stories, for instance. People using the same wallet addresses, or picking up the stories submitted by the same person regularly. There are many heuristics for discovering this sort of fraud and weeding it out of the system, blocking the participation of proven Sybyl attackers.

But this problem isn’t new in climate science. The promiscuity issues we saw in the Wegman Report years ago demonstrate that climate science was already captured by a sybyl attack in the scientific press, thus this is already a problem in climate science and how its peer review became pal review. We cannot possibly do any worse than has already happened, by enlisting the public to participate, and we can in fact recapture climate science from the sybyl attackers on the Hockey Team and their allies through the use of Trive.

However once you accept that the fact finding process is provably fair, the question is: So what? How does this impact fake news?

Once stories have been trived, and fake news articles rated as fake news, the plugin then has an effect on what you see on news sites. Looking at Huffpuff, or Slate, or NYT, or New Scientist with a browser using the plugin, stories that have been Trived to be fake have their text faded out. You cannot read those stories, or its very difficult to read the faded text. Stories that have survived triving and are not fake remain fully endarkened text as their formatting requires and even have a rating of veracity. Stories that have not been Trived will be indicated, and you can see the size of bounties on each untrived story. So you will see the more or less TRUE stories, and the FAKE stories will be faded out, causing you to be more inclined to read the stories that you can actually READ.

This means that readers will be more likely to read true stories than fake stories, and as a result, to see advertising on true stories and not on fake stories.

Once this happens, advertisers will start demanding of publishers that they should only pay for ads that appear on true stories, thus demonetizing fake news, and training the media through this carrot and stick approach, to focus on the truth.

News organizations that are competitive with each other for readership will submit each others stories to be trived, hoping that their competitors lose readers as a result, and advertising dollars. Best of all, we know that Chrome uses browser behavior to inform the Google search engine how to present search rankings, so by fading out fake news, people will only browse to real news, and googles search rankings will be corrected as a result.

Individuals worldwide seeking to earn money can participate in Trive at researcher, challenger, or jury witness levels. The more participants, the less possible it is for a Sybyl Attack to succeed. The more that participate, the more likely that the truth will win out.

And as individuals earn Trive tokens, they can sell them on crypto exchanges, or cash them out through their trive wallet, into other crypto, or fiat money like dollars. The Trive economy thus comes full circle not just on the researcher side but on the user side, producing a more truthful news media all over, not just with regard to climate science.

If a publication tried to take action against those using the Trive plugin (and btw, the Chrome plugin is just the first, we are pursuing having Trive built into several next generation browsers as a feature), that would be a newsworthy story that the publications competitors would love to publish.
The fading out of fake stories would apply to those using the Trive plugin or using browsers that build Trive functionality into their applications. Obviously given fake news is a growing public concern, there is an incentive for browser app developers to implement a solution. As more persons have their news filtered to weed out fake news, it becomes a stronger economic force motivating advertises to tell publishers to stop posting their ads on fake stories.

So the first viewers of an article get to make it unreadable and hence incapable of being evaluated by later readers. Sounds like a perfect setup for bots to control. I’d rather just avoid tabloid journalism sites entirely, than have some unknown process decide what’s fit for me to read.

To add to my other comment, juries have often reached incorrect verdicts especially when the evidence submitted to them has been cherry picked or modified. Jurors can also allow their biases to rule. I do not see how your “quality control” of jurors would actually work in practice.

I don’t like the idea of the faded article. I want to be able to read it to see what the fakers are trying to fake. Fading stuff out puts us in a bubble. Marking it fake would be more suitable. Another option would be to click on a box to make it readable. Who is to say whether people will spend money to support fake news? I’m not convinced this will work.

This looks like a clever technological solution to the wrong problem. A blockchain would help if the problem was people tampering with history or changing data. But that isn’t the real problem. The problem isn’t at the data level. The problem is what interpretations of the data are acceptable to state in public discourse.

Truth cannot be determined by consensus, especially in the presence of political correctness which creates a massive social disincentive to stating incorrect” interpretations. What we have is an entrenched “emperors new clothes” type situation where the consensus is on the side of a falsehood. I can’t see how adding a blockchain will fix this. If anything it will just make it harder for dissenting opinions to be heard.

Do not use a banned word. Most of us know at least some of the banned words that get you sent to moderation, but nobody knows them all.
Also, posting more than 4 or 5 comments a day sends you to the penalty box, as it seems. (Spam filter??)
Sometimes WordPress just eats your comment, without warning or reason. Sometimes your comment shows up within a few minutes, or a few hours.
Sometimes your comment is just *gone*.
Happens to all of us.

depends on if it’s spelled out or just the initials. BS, POed, etc are tamer versions of their more profane fully spelled out versions. similar in practice to the use of darn and heck as tamer alternatives to their more profane cousins.

“This looks like a clever technological solution to the wrong problem. A blockchain would help if the problem was people tampering with history or changing data. But that isn’t the real problem. The problem isn’t at the data level. The problem is what interpretations of the data are acceptable to state in public discourse”

I agree john. Many of the so called true vs fake news stories are created by misinterpretation of something someone said. It is locked in by media (or anyone) who thereafter insists that the misinterpreted version is what was actually said. The ‘mainstream’ news is famous for NEVER admitting they were wrong – about anything.
My favorite example if this is the OJ Simpson trial verdict. I watched nearly the entire trial live via a TV backhaul feed on what was then COURT TV. When the jury retired to deliberate I remember wondering if there was enough evidence to convict – but the media ‘experts’ NEVER wondered! They KNEW the verdict would be guilty! And they said so – often. When the jury found otherwise they were literally shocked it didn’t turn out the way they had predicted – and they haven’t changed their mind(s) yet.
Fact – OJ is not guilty of murder. Period! Did he kill those two victims – perhaps: but those legally responsible for making the call said “not guilty”
The media hasn’t figured it out yet.
The same attitude continues to exist in the media today re climate change issues.
How DO we get those who are stuck believing they are the only ones who know what is true- when they don’t – to change their minds?

On the contrary, it gives anyone who is capable of doing original research the ability to present evidence to a jury of anonymous peers in a double blind manner to decide what is true or not. One additional feature of the jury system: jurors get rated. Part of their ratings come from their performance as jurors on the winning or losing side of votes, but their ratings also come from regular questions about other facts that are either incontrovertible (like “the earth is round”) ranging to the ludicrous (like, “Michelle Obama is a man and Hillary Clinton is a lizard alien”) as well as situational questions to evaluate a jurors ability to be objective, to develop a measure of the jurors gullibility, rationality, and objectivity. So a Trive jury is not just some random crowd of knuckle draggers.

I think the intentions of this technology are good. But; “the road to hell…”. Taking the individual out of the decision as to what is ‘real’ and what is ‘fake’ is the wrong direction. Granted, you can fool some people all the time, all the people some of the time, but usually never all the people all the time. But I feel the consensus nature of this tool could be exploited and once an idea is locked into the immutable ledger, it becomes ‘gospel’; now you have a means to fool all the people all the time.

more seriously though, who decides which facts are incontrovertible (the earth isn’t actually round, you know, it’s a rather lumpy spheroid) and which ludicrous? who decides what counts as the “winning side”? who watches the watchmen/who fact checks the fact checkers? and what makes you think getting the most votes makes something accurate or “true”? At one time geocentricism would have gotten the most votes/been the winning side. didn’t stop heliocentrisim from coming along and showing geo to the door.

I don’t agree Ian. There is a looming backlash against political correctness, because it de-emphasizes truth in a practical, real-life sense. And people ARE tampering with history and data. People, in general, want the information disseminated to them to be accurate. Blockchain, once up and running, will give people a trustworthy place to assess news, and it’s HIGH TIME.

how can you be so sure it will provide trustworthy news? Would you consider James Corbett of Corbett Report, Richard Grove of TragedyandHope.com, John Taylor Gatto, Evan James Pilato of Media Monarchy, Brett Veinotte of SchoolSucks, or Jordan Peterson accurate and trustworthy? I do, and their research is air tight, significantly thorough, and doesn’t care about politics. ALL of them (save for Peterson because he is pointing out the pitfalls of cultural Marxism/neo-marxist Post modernism). Every single one of those sources are far more reputable than just about any other source currently considered as information delivery systems.

But let’s say the general population can’t shake the cognitive dissonance, then they will deem such researchers as “conspiritards” or “ring-wing loonies” and thus not actually be able to digest the information. Their built in bias and conditioning is too strong, so if the information displays the Clinton’s in a very sour light (because it is reality), most Democrats will immediately shut down and not consider the veracity of the information, especially if it is concerning their new messiah, the Big O. The same goes with most Republicans who love Reagan/Bush/Trump, etc. Think of how this site is received by the general public who eats up the wikipedia logical fallacy of ad hominem and “poisoning the well”. They aren’t well versed in the Trivium so they lack the facility for critical thought.

I could be missing something here about this article, and my apologies if so, but it appears this could easily be utilized by the status quo to continue reinforcing the litany of currently false paradigms. It seems to me this would create more “appeal to group” than is assumed by its creator. If I am wrong, please correct me because I genuinely want to trust this type of platform, but history has proven I must be skeptical.

My only issue is that NationStates are known to create fake news and then use multiple sources to drive the meme. In general, NSs have sufficient resources to swamp individuals, either by making participation in the Trive illegal, or by using actors with bot-fields to so do. Think China, think FancyBear, etc.

Very good point. I have arrived at a point where I do not believe until and unless my very specific doubts are addressed in a way that is satisfactory to me by someone who does not seem on close examination to have a stake in the verdict. If I don’t have sufficient confirmed facts then my willingness to believe is in direct contrast to how hard it is being sold to me. In a world of pervasive untruths, this system seems to work quite well for me.

It’s worse than that. I can’t see how this system can do anything about the original data except assume that it’s correct.
That might not be true when billions of dollars of UNFCCC Green Climate Funding will come to a certain country if the temperatures are rising but maybe not come if they are stable or falling. That’s a huge incentive for the national meteorological service, under government instruction, to quietly adjust the data upwards by let’s say 0.02 per year (1 degree in 50 years).

Well no, because researchers and challengers are not limited in their data sources to what is out on the internet. They are free to do original research, even personal investigation. If they are in a war zone, they can personally docuement what is going on: Did a chemical weapons attack actually happen in such a town in such a country, or not, and who was really responsible? ANYONE can become an investigative reporter providing evidence to the Trive to document the truth about such events, and store it permanently for history. Potentially Trive if properly used by enough people will be enough to ensure that such atrocities become less likely and easier to hold the perpetrators to account.

Disagree Dan. Are juries in court cases a left-leaning foundation? No. They come to a consensus on what is probably the truth, and what is probably false. The jury is the public, not the government. Government or State cannot be trusted, but random public jurers with no agenda, can be.

conceptually, many ideas are fantastic. However, most concepts involve systems and systems will inevitably corrupt with time. I’m sure there is a law about that decay but it is inevitable.
Juries- corrupted through selection by trial lawyers, this idea of peers, or even the idea that the population has the right to pass judgement over another, when they can’t even take the log out of their own eye.
government- speaks for itself, just look at the body count.

The OJ Simpson jury did determine a truth: that the african american community was sick of the racism and corruption in the LA police and was going to send a message. While it is too bad that OJs actual victims and their families failed to get the justice they deserved, there was a higher justice that was served.

Indeed not, but there are also not infallible when it comes to the truth. Many a times a jury has come to the factually wrong conclusion either through inherent biases (there have been racist juries in the past) or because one lawyer was better are crafting a narrative than the other one or a judge didn’t allow certain testimony that would have shed a different light on the case, or because a juror had already formed an opinion from news report rather than judging based on evidence presented at trial or a myriad of other reasons.

pack the system with jurors that already believe the narrative you want (regardless how true it is) and you have a wonderful system for pushing fake news onto the masses.

never. and even if I did, I fail to see how buying Trive tokens will force the someone who is “wrong on the internet” to admit to that fact when logic, facts, links, and other evidence had already failed to do so.

Thats not the point. The point is, there are LOTS of people who waste a LOT of time arguing with “people who are wrong on the internet” or “because the internet is wrong” who should be more than willing to put their money where their mouths are. hence, Trive is monetizable.

So if I’m reading this right, if I own a Trive and I see an article on a climate website I think is wrong, I can report it, it will be investigated and “jury” agree the post will be blacklisted. Nobody with the plug-in will be able to see the post and the website loses money in advertising. Is that correct?

But by the time all this happens hundreds of people will have seen the incorrect article, it will have been duplicated across many other websites and the misinformation will have been spread by tweets and will be repeated for years to come. Meanwhile the original article will be months old and would already been buried under hundreds of more recent articles. And of course there’s nothing stopping the website from repeating the fake claims in new articles.

Not that I’m sold on the concept but presumably it would be pretty simple to maintain a registry of articles and Trive rating. If it caught on and became a significant tool of judgement then probably the article would almost need to show its evolving rating to be taken seriously by anyone looking it up.

As previously stated, the rating goes with the claim, not the specific article. So once ajudicated, for instance, that NASA astronauts really did land on the moon, than ANY article on the internet that claimed otherwise would see itself downrated automatically as a result.

How exactly do you plan on downrating every article “automatically” on the internet that makes a false claim like NASA faked the moon landings? The model of Trive seems to be only that readers submit articles they want judged and so Trive has no way of automatically censoring websites. And who gets to decide if the claim A is the same as claim B? Again there would appear to be nothing in the documentation about how similar claims are evaluated. And if Trive is just hashing the news articles to store their ratings then changing a single character would change the hash value and thus
Trive would not recognise it as the same article.

More fundamentally how fast do you see this process working? Most news websites update their
websites several times a day so Trive would have to work much faster than that – and the researchers would have to work faster, more accurately and cheaper than ordinary journalists for this model to make any sense. All of which seems unlikely.

indeed. For example the claim “Obama was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii” would be rated as false (assuming the jury wasn’t packed with birthers) but the similar claim that “Barack Obama’s then-literary agency, Acton & Dystel, touted that Obama was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii in a promotional booklet produced in 1991.” is actually objectively and demonstrably true. How does Trive determine the difference between the two (considering they contain the exact same sequence of words: “Obama was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii”) or would it rate the 2nd as false automatically because the other was adjudicated first (or both true if the 2nd was rated first)?

To solve this, a researcher would file a FOIA request with the British government for its copies of the Barack Obama Kenyan colonial birth records (which I assure you, they have, I’ve talked to people at GCHQ about them). Even if the FOIA request is rejected for reasons, such a rejection would have to affirm that such records actually do exist or not, which is really about all you need to know, right?

here’s a hint for you: you question asked about two claims that contain the same set of word yet have two different truth values. You only talked about the first if the claims while the question asked how trive differentiates between the two given your claims about how it would automatically downrate based on the adjudication of one of the claims.

try that again with some of the typos cleaned up, wouldn’t want you top focus on the typos and not the question (I really wish wordpress would offer an edit option):

here’s a hint for you: the question asked about two claims that contain the same set of words yet have two different truth values. You only talked about the first of the claims, while the question asked how trive differentiates between the two given your statement about how it would automatically downrate based on the adjudication of a claim rather than on specific articles.

stories that have been Trived to be fake have their text faded out. You cannot read those stories

Censorship, pure and simple.
Blockchain has been proposed to solve all the world’s problems in one way or another. OK, so it is just another techno fad.
But we see behind it, just another urge to rule.
And who pays for it all?

And as individuals earn Trive tokens, they can sell them on crypto exchanges

In other words, nobody.

Add it all up, it is just another vision of a Utopia.
That has worked out *so* well in the past.

TonyL ==> I believe the greying out of news stories deemed FAKE by TRIVE will only appear greyed out to those who are viewing the story in Chrome browser with the TRIVE add-on installed. It is a tool elected to be used by the reader — the end-user.
It is no more CENSORSHIP that asking any number of “safe web surfing” apps to block or warn about dangerous sites that attempt to infect one’s computer with malware.

Those with a particular set of biasis will subscribe to ensure they see nothing that will upset their bias. Those with different biasis can set up their own system to block out anything that might trigger them.

In theory I’m all for filtering out things that are objectivly false, but that’s not much of a help if people who belive the fake stuff will be the ones with no filter.

Bellman ==> I think that the idea is that a very diverse group will eventually move towards information that is verifiable as correct. Don’t know if it will work for subjects where the broader public has been bamboozled already — such as with climate change.

“I think that the idea is that a very diverse group will eventually move towards information that is verifiable as correct.”

Maybe that’s the intention, but I’m a little skeptical when the headline says its purpose is to “destroy alarmist fake news”.

The paper does talk about the importance of “Diversity of opinion”, but I’m not sure how easy it will be to have a representative diversity when everyone has to literally buy into the system in the first place.

That said I don’t think the idea is necessarily bad. The idea of some sort of crowd sourced fact checking could work, but I find the way it is being implemented worrying. For a start the constant emphasis on “the Truth”, and the idea that this will be used to attack news companies and persuade them to only publish stuff which is approved by the “Human Swarmed crowd wisdom”. Even if this is motivated by the highest ideals, I suspect it will be difficult to stop it becoming a political tool.

“but I have put up a trial on TRIVE uding my recent essay here on Vectorborne diseases as a test case”

As a mater of interest, which article areyou putng on trial, the one from NYT or Science?

In either case I’m not sure how this would refute the group think problem. You disagree with an article and get it hidden. The real test wouldbeif articlesyou agree with are hidden when they contain factual inacuraces.

I see a big problem with this. Let’s say that some media publishes some fake news. And someone sends it to Trive and it is detected as fake or containing falsehoods. What is “trived” is a static version of the text of such media. As soon as the media changes a sentence, or a comma, the plugin will no longer detect it as the same that was trived and will not be able to (and shouldn’t) obscure the text, even if still the same falsehood is in the text, just written differently. Which means that it is very easy for some media that regularly publishes fake news to fool Trive’s plugin and pretend to be trustworthy.

As answered on a prior comment on Part I, new information that comes to light means that a story can be re-trived to present new evidence to a new jury. A story gets trived not at the time of publishing, but when a reader or a number of readers decide to report it to Trive for triving. So your edit issue isn’t valid.

stuffed if i get blockchain or the whole imaginary money thing
ive tried
and anything that can be lost in a microblink stored in a pc etc that can go awol in a cme or powersurge..nah
normal banks manage enough scams n thefts the oldfashioned way as it is.
Mz luddite i may be;-) but using the blockchai thingy to screen seems another way that people will also avoid having to do their own research n thinking etc
mind you seeing gurgles search sneakiness interrupted would be nice
duckduckgo works fine, i remove chrome and the g word and most of the other engines as a matter of course.

a) its not imaginary money. Data is as real as the light coming out of your computer screen, or do you not believe in the existence of photons or electrons as ‘real’ parts of the universe we live in?
b) you can store cryptocurrency on a USB drive, put it in a metal safe, wrap it in tinfoil, whatever, immune to CME or power surge. you can also store crypto on paper. Paper wallets are popular backups among crypto people because a lot of us are also preppers. Post-CME, the crypto network can be reconstituted relatively easily even if the internet as we know it is not. You can transmit blockchain data by shortwave radio, or by using pony express to spread USB drive stored copies of the entire blockchain.
c) Normal banks are scams because their money is fake. The Federal Reserve Note the US banks issue, and similar fiat issued by other central banks, is not backed by anything at all other than the government putting a gun to your head and telling you that it is worth something. Cryptocurrency is intrinsically valuable just like gold and silver because it is unforgeably costly to produce, and has broad utility as both a medium of exchange and a store of value based solely on market supply and demand, requiring no government to order you to believe in it.

cryptocurrency is not even a currency. For a currency to be useable it must have a relatively stable value (ie: us dollar). Cryptocurrency value is far to variable to be used on a day to day basis to purchase goods and services. cryptocurrency is a investment vehicle just like gold and silver. it can,t be used in day to day transactions. example Monday I agree to pay you 2000 cryptos worth $10.00 for a roofing job. 10 days later on job completion I pay you 2000 cryptos which have lost 25% of there value. you still happy to get 2000 cryptos? It’s value fluctuates to quickly and greatly to currently be a “currency” . investor Ponzi scheme at best.

You clearly do not know what a ponzi actually is. You might want to look it up. Most currencies in the world are far less stable than the US dollar. Looking at Zimbabwe, for instance, which has price inflation in the hundreds of thousands of percent, the people see bitcoin as a far more stable store of value, which cannot be corrupted by their government, so it trades at a premium against even the US dollar in that nation. That is just the start. The world outside the US is radically bootstrapping itself financially with blockchain, just as they did to their communications infrastructure a decade ago with cellphone technologies.

Lets see, I can take my dollar, euro, yen, etc to a store in the appropriate territory and buy things. It has value/is worth something because it can usefully be used for the exchange of good and services therefore it is real (ie not fake) money. I take my trive tokens, bitcoins, monero , or other crytpocurrencies to the same establishments and….. I get nothing. It’s not useful for the exchange of goods and services so yes, it is imaginary (ie fake) money.

And how exactly does that work when you go into a store and buy and object that is priced in dollars? They don’t give the store bitcoins do they? No, VISA gives them dollars. you VISA debit card is transacting in dollars (or euros or whatever real currency is in operation in the country you live). It’s the same as if you had a debit card backed by a home loan. Is your house currency? no it’s collateral same here. want to try again.

“The Federal Reserve Note the US banks issue, and similar fiat issued by other central banks, is not backed by anything at all other than the government putting a gun to your head and telling you that it is worth something”

1) that’s more than crypto has backing them up ;)
2) That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of fiat issue. While the Dollar isn’t directly backed by a single physical object (ie gold) it is backed by the US government. The US is a large place with lots of valuable resources (including a huge gold reserve) as well as a large pool of workers. The Dollar thus is backed by those resources and that labour. what is crypto backed by? wishful thinking,

“Cryptocurrency is intrinsically valuable just like gold and silver”

No, it simply isn’t. it’s ones and zeros with no value intrinsic to itself. You can take gold or silver and make things with it. you can’t do that with crypto. The only value it has is the wishful thinking of the gullible fools who think it has value.

Nice initiative. Although the author is seriously misinformed on how Google ranks its results. There is no “active interference in search rankings” because some board member joined. That claim equals shoving thousands of Google engineers down the drain and then add make vacuous claims. Perhaps not a bad thing to have such articles on page #293 after all ;-)

No but seriously, Google ranks indeed by automated “pal review” in the sense that publications are weighed much like Wikipedia does manually, simply on notability. For example if a site with some scientific topic is being linked from noted science blogs, forums, government sites and academic places, it will be understood as very likely to contain relevant material to anyone searching for more information.

While this indeed *implies* some evaluation of the relevance of the status of science blogs or government and academic sites, to reverse such algorithm generally would seriously downgrade search results. It’s just on the topics where one finds himself in disagreement with the majority of notable online publications where the problem of the algorithm reveals itself.

The Thrive system however seem to add nothing fundamentally different from the broken peer review system, Wikipedia and other systems dependent on 3rd party opinions or just loads of money. At best we get a worse and slower Google variant which will be bogged down in the very same conflicts and accusations.

The only good “system” is cultivation of healthy, critical human minds. A lot of hard work and some suffering goes into those!

These claims were shown to be fake news several years ago when Google announced its board of adjustment. It was even a story here on WUWT. Google takes active measures to downgrade skeptical websites. This is provably true by the fact that WUWT continues to get higher traffic than all other climate blogs, yet is rated far lower in search rankings. This does not just apply to WUWT, which gets cited quite often in the press, but ClimateAudit, which is regularly cited in peer review and other sources for their much more rigorous cross examination of alarmist BS, also gets downgraded by Google far more than it should.

….Question: Why can’t mister fat wallet just buy a ton of tokens and pay a bunch of people to pollute the system with crap?

This questions addresses what we call a Sybyl Attack, where a group of individuals, or bot accounts, are used to overpopulate a system to bias the course of its blockchain. This is a valid concern when a blockchain is young and has few users. However once it has grown sufficiently, the public as a whole always exceeds the resources of any individual Sybyl attacker. One reason I’m publishing these stories on WUWT is to get the word out to the skeptical public so that YOU can be part of the solution….

How do you handle the situation where activists have convinced a large part of the population that their fake news is true?

For instance – the Brent Spar episode. There, Shell had produced the best environmental answer to a disposal problem, and were prevented from doing this by Greenpeace, who lied about the levels of oil in the container. In a word, fake news. And yet the majority of UK citizens believed Greenpeace, and Shell had to conduct a more environmentaly damaging and more expensive disposal solution.

Dodgy geezer, You can fool some of the people some of the time, but not all of the people. Activists cannot dupe people forever. People are becoming increasingly aware that the “news” disseminated is fake or falsified. Something has to be done to ensure ‘news’ is accurate, and hopefully blockchain technology like Trive can provide a mechanism. It will take time, but it will catch on and take hold.

Actually the famed and legendary “tulip bubble” of the 1600’s was a myth entirely fabricated by an 1800’s book titled “The Madness of Crowds”. Outside of a small clique of tulip merchants and flower fans in Holland, there was no tulip bubble, and nobody lost their fortunes on it. The exchange records from the era (which still exist) clearly show the claims of that book to be Fake News.

you clearly do not know me. One reason we invented blockchain technology was to tear down the globalists, the nationalists, the central banks and bankers, the fiat money speculators, the ponzi scammers, the naked shorting hedge funders, and all others that seek to demolish and degrade western civilization. The wealth of the anglosphere was built on sound money: gold and silver. It has decayed under fiat money and become a looters paradise. Blockchain enables digital money that behaves exactly like gold and silver money. That is exactly the opposite of what the globalists want. Please take your ad homs elsewhere.

Mike, I appreciate your motivation and I agree with your sentiments.
However, this notion that the group is smarter than the individual is so profoundly false I nearly threw up my coffee. A group is collection of individuals, which by it’s nature is subject to many competing ideas. More importantly, if the collection of individuals suffers from corrupt data as it’s foundation, the outcome is equally false. anyway, it is not proven scientifically so please don’t make such absurd, arbitrary, and demonstrably false proclamations.

all I need is one example to demonstrate the falseness of that theory. I could pick literally thousands of real world examples. The most glaring: taxation. Taxation is always theft, cannot be anything other than theft, for all time. full stop. The majority has accepted this as morally justifiable, and yet look at the outcome.
Endless war. Central banking. Imperialism. State indoctrination labeled education. forced vaccination. property taxes which brings a litany of ridiculous regulation. fluoridated water. I could go on and on. No, the convenience and comforts do not outweigh the negatives of a system based on mandatory theft, euphemistically labeled taxation.
what else? Burning of heretics. Smart meters and the smart grid. Communist nations killing millions. Atom bombs being dropped on civilians. whole nations being usurped by the UN. on and on and on and on.

get a group of democrats to make a decision about mandating solar power, like has happened in California new home builds. Did that group demonstrate superior intellect? hardly.
unfortunately I don’t have the time to get into this in depth but I would highly suggest rethinking your faith in the collective. It has proven to be diabolically foul throughout history.

Replete, even. I suggest you look on the trive.news site to the cited scientific research demonstrating the conditions under which wisdom of the crowds is significantly superior even to the smartest individuals or groups. It is by no means univerally applicable, but the anglo system of law would not be considered the best in the world if wisdom of the crowds was not generally true.

picking on typos just shows how poor your own arguments are. Stick to the issues, grammar police someone who cares.

As for ” the anglo system of law would not be considered the best in the world if wisdom of the crowds was not generally true” sorry, but it’s not the “wisdom of crowds” (ie mob rule) that we have juries. juries don’t determine truth, they determine guilt or innocence to a certain level of doubt completely different things.

No, the jury will decide based on their preconceived notions of what is evidence and what is not. They will put on their individually biased glasses and strain out that which does not conform to their personal world view. There are very few people who can look at evidence that contradicts their personal position and embrace it.

This is why the jury system will have a reputation system built into it that in addition to rating people on their decision making history, will question the juror occasionally on various issues of fact, everything from “the earth is round”, e=mc^2, to “NASA astronauts landed on the moon” which are all rather incontrovertible facts that anyone but a moonbat recognizes as true, to more questionable claims like “The USAF captured a UFO at Roswell in 1947” and “Chemtrails are brainwashing Americans”, which allow an ability to gauge a jurors relative gullibility and objectivity.

Intrinsic value is attached to the work required. The intrinsic value is imbued to the blockchain by the purchasers of the Trive Tokens. The work is done to receive the value. I think this will work. At least it has all the elements necessary. The value has to come from somewhere – ‘if’ they will buy Tokens. Bitcoins value is derived from its scarcity. Trive Tokens are different, correct?

Trive tokens are blockchain generated by smart contract, and as such, have a limited supply. So, while using a slightly different consensus algorithm than bitcoin, the principles of intrinsic scarcity, unforgeable costliness, mean that the trive token will rise in value over time as more people use Trive. Tokens are divisible (I believe up to eight decimal places), so as the token rises in value, the amount of tokens you need to post as a bounty to get a researcher to accept the job becomes smaller. So, this would encourage people to buy in early while the price is low to have a “fat wallet” as the trive community expands.

Thanks mikelorrey. Thanks for helping develop this new technology and for explaining it, although I must admit I don’t understand the tech-side yet, but I DO understand the practical side of the mechanism. From your answers to skeptical comments it is apparent you have examined this technology in depth; but know one can know for sure how it will perform until it is tried. New Technology has solved a huge number of problems for Humanity; where would we be without it?:)))) This is exciting and so worthwhile, I hope it works and catches on.

Mike Lorrey, Have you hind tested the process? Would, for instance, plate tectonics have ever become accepted? It seems that under the system you propose it would fail. Likewise dinosaurs -> birds. Any number of examples come to mind.

I strongly suggest you read the white paper on the website. New science would clearly be accepted by Trive because new science clearly demonstrates its validity through EVIDENCE which can be examined by jury in double blind trials.

Have you hind tested the process against once improbable now accepted science? At the time of plate tectonics the idea would have been downvoted into oblivion by the most respected members of the community and the general public.

mikelorrey, how do you get juries to rule on the evidence rather than on their prejudices? If I don’t like a position I can simply rule against it. If there is a consensus in society that your position is “hate speech” or “anti-science” (evidence be damned) how can you guarantee the evidence will be the basis of the jury’s decision?

Scientists in general treat findings which do not agree with their pre-conceived theories by ignoring them, or claiming that the findings were spurious, instrument error, or just plain wrong.Look at how Prof Ian Jolliffe, the world expert on PCA, behaved when he was forced to admit that Mann’s maths was wrong. He said (I paraphrase) “I suppose it’s wrong, but what he’s trying to prove must be right, for lots of other reasons…”

Look at the current pages of Retraction Watch. Someone has tried to replicate an important paper in neurophysiology, found that they could not, and tried to publish in Nature. Nature announced that they are anxious to publish rebuttals of accepted science, and are now trying every trick to avoid doing so.

Your proposal will run up against the fact that activists can make people say that black is white if they so wish…

Dawg, yes we’ve done testing of previously disproven facts, for instance, the “Dewey Wins!” headline of the Truman election. Hind testing is rather easy because you know what people believed before new information came to light.

you clearly do not know me. One reason we invented blockchain technology was to tear down the globalists, the nationalists, the central banks and bankers, the fiat money speculators, the ponzi scammers, the naked shorting hedge funders, and all others that seek to demolish and degrade western civilization. The wealth of the anglosphere was built on sound money: gold and silver. It has decayed under fiat money and become a looters paradise. Blockchain enables digital money that behaves exactly like gold and silver money. That is exactly the opposite of what the globalists want. Please take your ad homs elsewhere. – mikelorrey

This reply is machine like, are you sure you aren’t a bot?

Again, who are you people? You have no human sense, you come across as alien, in any sense of the word!

The problem with this, as I see it, is that you assume people don’t wan’t to read fake news. The reality is that many\most readers are fine with fake news as long as it conforms to their viewpoints. They only oppose fake news that goes against their views. Imagine if Griff or Ivan installed the plug-in and woke up to find every Guardian article they tried to read was blurred out. LOL

Another thing: MSM outlets (most of whom are left leaning) don’t care whether the articles they publish are real or fake. They only care about page views and ad revenue, both of which continue to decline,resulting in operating losses and layoffs.

And what about the liability issue. What if Trive marks a story as fake and the website sues them for lost revenue?

You make a good point that some people enjoy reading fake news, else tabloids would not be one of the few profitable areas of the news business, nor would news have become so tabloid-like. We will have to see what the market decides.
As for the liability issue: Trive is a DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization. When fully operational, there is nobody to sue because the blockchain is its own operating entity. It has no and needs no human supervision, so nobody is responsible for what it does. We will have to grab some popcorn and see how the courts figure out who is the proper person to sue in such a case.

In the white paper the claim is made that subscribers will pay $1/month to get access to Trive.
Who exactly will that money go to if Trive is a DAO? I would guess that the courts would sue whoever is collecting the money.

and that person or corporation got their Trive from somewhere (and another person or corporation) all the way back until you come to the original source. Following the money and eventually you will come to someone that can be sued.

John – it is better than that. Trive takes in money and distributes cryptocurrency coins which they create
out of nothing. And then they pay all their researchers using Trive coins while continuing to collect real
money from their subscribers.

The advantage that a Sybyl Attack enjoys is one of fervent activism to an agenda by the attackers.
It is how the environmental agenda, the the social justice agenda (LGBT and BLM for instance) have been successful at altering the consensus within organizations and in society at large.

That activism is always taken from a moral superiority position, even where no moral superiority exists on deep examination. And even in some cases, the activism is directly and diametrically opposed to the existing canons within an organization.

Well no, the SJWs have been able to push their agenda because they already have the instrumentalities of the state to push their agenda forward, while those who do not want to be tyrannized by them, have no alternative. Trive is the alternative. Whether you choose to use it is up to you. “You can lead a horses arse to knowledge but you cannot make him think.” – Robert A Heinlein.

Please allow me to express my self in relation to the subject here, and my superficial understanding of it.
Not meaning to upset or otherwise, simply trying to engage.

I think in principal, as per my point of view, the idea you forward is a good idea.
But also I think there is some not so quite clear position of it all.

For example, the main points that attract me, and to some point may subject me to an argument are:

First the consideration of the term “bounty” and “bounty hunters” , as per the concept of the blockchain.

Second the consideration of Alec Turing and his amazing success in code breaking..

And third, the real meaning of proof of work, where the 21 million limit no ever can be passed in bitcoin, where it simply stands as a “peak bitcoin”, no any better than any other “peak” of whatever or however contemplated and considered up to now. Same in principle. Still not that bad as a reference point for some kind of assessment.

So when it comes to the “bounty” in the context of blockchan, I think it works differently, it works slightly different, as far as I can tell.
Who puts the “bounty” does not pay the “bounty hunters”, in the end,,,,, that one simply gets compensated and payed by the “bounty hunters”, if the “bounty” not fake.
Which makes the principle of “payment” quite opposite to what your method here suggests.

Second, as far as I can tell, even when considering the success of Turing and his “Machine” as per the concept of a brute force attack, the real thing stands as in the lines of, without the codes, still that could not have being good enough or successful enough, which brinks us back to the blockchane, where without the codes and the valid path no much gain there, regardless of the potential of hacking and trespassing…there really no chance to destroy data, and no chance to hide after.
The Turing legacy.

In this point, if I am not wildly dreaming, blockchane behaves and is like a well mix of reality in cyberspace with and a “honey pot” process, in the same time-space in internet. “Live”
A very quick and efficient tracking and live monitoring of the trespassers, without the trespasser being really aware of it….at all. Maybe this a little too much. :)

Then, I really think, that the claim of 21 million limit in bitcoin, is a bit far fetched, even when addressing it mathematically, it can offer some insight in the matter.

All this I say is simply in the context of, as simply as put, good idea but not a “free range” one as expected to be, from my point of view in the regard of the blockchain.

At this point I got to ask this simple question.

If you think and you happen to believe that in one or two decades the governments of this world of ours must change and really adapt to this “thing” in a flexible and efficient way, or else….how could this ‘thing” be or was allowed to be and persist by this same governments, which really must have ‘hated’ and ‘despised” it so much.

How this kind of “nemesis” of the Cyber bulling power was allowed in the first place, by the most powerful and most “cyber potential” and most “cyber bulling” governments of this world of ours (and all their most potential and most powerful cyber agencies)?? ….how could this be????

Actually, the 21 million limit in Bitcoin is hard coded. There WILL NOT ever be more than 21 million bitcoin ever created. I’ve seen the code myself, it is the same code that is in millions of bitcoin wallets, and nodes, and mining rigs around the world. Nobody can alter that code and contribute to the network to generate unauthorized coins. As soon as someone alters the code, they’ve forked their code from that of the Bitcoin blockchain, and their code is no longer bitcoin.

That is an assessment in regard of “peak economy” and or “peak energy” and or “peak of civic evolution”.

Not actually a bad as an assessment starting point, for math, but still not under “never ever” clause to be subject under increased and go up of the civic growth and it’s economy and energy, when all kips going up and evolving and growing continuously…with a clear tendency for better efficiency and better performance.

The central core potential and economics of blockchain seems to be quite pro growth with the best efficient performing paths possible, so there is no so much chance of any “peak” there in reality, only there a way to address the potential through consideration of peak, in a stage to stage bases pass.

“incomprehensible……” etc
My sentiments also. In my now long experience of human regulatory systems (that includes a substantial amount of statute drafting), one thing stands out. The best systems are simple ones. Sooner or later, complexity fails.

The author wrote the following:
“The courts are a mess of bias,
police are blatantly abusive of citizens
unless they are provably elites,
elections are being stolen by voter fraud”.
In my opinion, the author has a problem recognizing reality,
and should not be listened to.
Even worse, his proposal is for MORE censorship
of climate science and climate change documents,
as if some powerful “committee”, or “jury”,
could determine what is fake science,
and what is real science.
Mainstream climate “science” is mainly assumptions,
speculation and wrong predictions of the future climate.
That’s why we are here — we can tell the difference between
fake (junk) science and real science.
We don’t like the wild guess predictions of doom, but we have
to read some of them to understand, and then refute,
the latest climate change fairy tales.
.
.
.
The author also wrote:
“We can no longer trust our media.”
The truth is we could NEVER trust our media,
and the bias / lack of investigative reporting
didn’t start in 2016:
— The fake Gulf of Tonkin incident
was used to ramp up the Vietnam War.
— The fake weapons of mass destruction claim
was used to start a war with Iraq.
— The Trump-Russian collusion never happened.
— Every scary climate article is published by
leftist-biased media (about 95%) without question.

“Fake news” is effective because once the bomb is dropped the damage is done. How would this stop the original misinformation? The only measurement of success for a commercial news outlet is audience size, not truth. The notion that a retailer would place adds in media because they are truthful rather than widely viewed is noble but won’t sell more retailer product. I also bet there’s reasons why businesses choose one news outlet over another to carry their advertisements due to audience type and not size. That being said I hope I’m wrong and this succeeds.

I admit I haven’t read it all but, from what I did read it seems that there is too much reliance on the numbers that agree with…whatever…rather than whether or not “whatever” is actually true.
Also, why would the “MannLewGliech”s care about Trive as long as they got the headline?

A noble effort. Keep being noble … but don’t expect others to be the same.

I repeat, I didn’t read everything. Maybe my thoughts have already been addressed.

There are two very similar situations here which you do not diferentiate between.

One is the case where an individual tries to convince someone of something using incorrect or unbalanced information, and relies on the ‘mark’ not being able to find out the truth. Let us call that the ‘Car Salesman’ case. This is a circumstance where the only active participants are the salesman and the customer – all other people have no concern about the outcome, and would be happy to analyse claims objectively.

The second is the case where a person tries to change someone’s political viewpoint, using data which is currently accepted as accurate using prevailing scientific theory. In this case there are a whole host of extra participants – the supporters of the originally-held political belief – who will rapidly exert social pressure to suppress the person from communicating, will develop multiple spurious arguments to ‘rebut’ the original data (leading to infinite regress arguments) and will pull up drawbridges to create an ‘us and them’ attitude, where supporters are expected to rally to the flag and support the political viewpoint at issue, in spite of any evidence to the contrary.

Your system will work well for the first situation. There are many examples of ‘expert’ consumer mazines and blogs which offer fairly dispassionate ‘true’ data about consumer items already. But there are NO similar services for political debate, or, indeed, religious matters. Because these are topics where there are few or no ‘independent’ analysts. Under these circumstances your blockchain structure is fatally undermined.

To better understand how humans behave in the circumstances we are in, I heartily recomend Charles Mackay’s excellent book Extrordinary Popular Delusiions and the Madness of Crowds It’s readily available on Ebay and Amazon, and free on Gutenberg:

It is a fact that any human driven system cannot find truth where no truth is known to exist. A Trive jury could not, for instance, determine whether God or any god, exists. In that respect it is a form of Turing Machine: capable of great feats of logical analysis to weed out falsehood, but ultimately incapable of arriving at knowledge about Ideal big T Truths.

it’s not even that. it’s capable of great feats of analysis to weed out non-consensus viewpoints. The thing is the consensus isn’t necessarily what it true, and the non-consensus viewpoint isn’t necessarily what is false.

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